The Great Zero Gate

There is no stability in the world; it is like a house on fire. This is not a place where you can stay for a long time. The murderous demon of impermanence is instantaneous, and it does not choose between the upper and lower classes, or between the old and the young.If you want to be no different from the buddhas and Zen masters, just don’t seek externally.

The pure light in a moment of awareness in your mind is the Buddha’s essence within you. The nondiscriminating light in a moment of awareness in your mind is the Buddha’s wisdom within you. The undifferentiated light in a moment of awareness in your mind is the Buddha’s manifestation within you.

– Thomas Cleary, Zen Essence

The Great Zero Gate

The Revolt of the Imagination, Part One: Notes on Belbury Syndrome

Imagination is thus one of the basic tools of human empathy. Under most circumstances, we don’t perceive the world through anyone else’s eyes and mind but our own.  There are ways around that limitation, but the most flexible and expansive of the lot is the imagination. When you were six and your mother told you, “How would you feel if he did that to you?”—if, in fact, she was so unfashionable as to do something so useful to your future mental health—she was trying to get you to use your imagination, to construct from your own memories a figuration of what you would have felt if you had been in the other child’s place. That use of the imagination becomes the basis for moral reflection, and ultimately for one kind of wisdom.

The Revolt of the Imagination, Part One: Notes on Belbury Syndrome | Ecosophia

The Rise of the End-State: Impending Signs of Collapse & the Engineering of a Technocratic Totalitarian “Reset”

The Privilege of Rights

Your human rights are being re-brand­ed as priv­i­leges grant­ed by gov­ern­ments, conditionally: In a sys­tem of exces­sive priv­i­leges, “free­dom” of indi­vid­ual rights (and indi­vid­ual respon­si­bil­i­ty) is replaced by the per­ceived “safe­ty” of gov­ern­ment-pro­vid­ed priv­i­leges.

Cit­i­zens become slaves of gov­ern­ment in the form of exces­sive debt (and tax­es) to pay for the priv­i­leges, and by con­form­ing to the exces­sive require­ments of the privileges.

Modem-day total­i­tar­i­an sys­tems, such as the Nazi, Sovi­et and cur­rent world­wide “com­mu­ni­tar­i­an” sys­tem, are col­lec­tivist sys­tems of priv­i­leges with­out indi­vid­ual rights.

Every­thing, includ­ing all life, is con­sid­ered a “spe­cial priv­i­lege” owned by gov­ern­ment.

The cream of cor­rup­tion ris­es to the top, as the most self­ish indi­vid­u­als gain gov­ern­ment con­trol over the priv­i­leges of fel­low cit­i­zens for their own per­son­al agendas.

The Rise of the End-State: Impending Signs of Collapse & the Engineering of a Technocratic Totalitarian “Reset”

Review: ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’ – The Atlantic

“How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”? It’s a pretty good question. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.” It isn’t clear to me how many possibilities are left us now, in a world of polities whose populations number in the tens or hundreds of millions. But stuck we certainly are.

Review: ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’ – The Atlantic

Genius Loci

When he hops his first wall, Hayes crosses an invisible line not only onto private land but – as if crossing a mythical threshold – into another mode of existence. He has become a vagrant, a category of undesirable conjured up by a legal system that ‘sought to criminalise not anti-social actions, but, rather, a state of being, a social and economic status, a type of person.’ As well as being a gripping history of land ownership in England – a journey that leads from the Norman invasion through medieval peasants’ revolts and the land-grabs of the Enclosures all the way up to Greenham Common and the eruption of Occupy – The Book of Trespass is an attempt to shatter what Hayes calls ‘the mindwall’, an internalisation of ruling-class power so effective we don’t even see it. ‘The wall presents itself as a blank statement of authority, and we obey it because we see it without its context. The mindwall has become so entrenched in our heads that it remains unchallenged and unquestioned.’

Genius Loci – Dark Mountain

Tomorrow Belongs to the Corporatocracy

We haven’t really got our minds around it yet, because we’re still in the early stages of it, but we have entered an epoch in which historical events are primarily being driven, and societies reshaped, not by sovereign nation states acting in their national interests but by supranational corporations acting in their corporate interests. Paramount among these corporate interests is the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism, and the elimination of any impediments thereto. Forget about the United States (i.e., the actual nation state) for a moment, and look at what’s been happening since the early 1990s. The US military’s “disastrous misadventures” in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, and the former Yugoslavia, among other exotic places (which have obviously had nothing to do with the welfare or security of any actual Americans), begin to make a lot more sense. Global capitalism, since the end of the Cold War (i.e, immediately after the end of the Cold War), has been conducting a global clean-up operation, eliminating actual and potential insurgencies, mostly in the Middle East, but also in its Western markets. Having won the last ideological war, like any other victorious force, it has been “clear-and-holding” the conquered territory, which in this case happens to be the whole planet. Just for fun, get out a map, and look at the history of invasions, bombings, and other “interventions” conducted by the West and its assorted client states since 1990. Also, once you’re done with that, consider how, over the last fifteen years, most Western societies have been militarized, their citizens placed under constant surveillance, and an overall atmosphere of “emergency” fostered, and paranoia about “the threat of extremism” propagated by the corporate media.

via Tomorrow Belongs to the Corporatocracy – Consent Factory, Inc.

The Art of Rebellion, Part 1: Of Martial Traditions

via The Art of Rebellion, Part 1: Of Martial Traditions — DGR News Service

Physicists Say Consciousness Might Be a State of Matter

via Physicists Say Consciousness Might Be a State of Matter | NOVA | PBS | NOVA | PBS

It’s Not What You Know, It’s How You Think

There are many trends and patterns to be found in the past, and the Durants do a commendable job of highlighting them. The essence of their view, however, can be summarized by the following sentence from their short book:

“The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.”

In many ways, the Durants believed that despite all that has and continues to change in our external environment, the real battle is still internal, and real change isn’t produced until we face our minds and our thoughts.

via It’s Not What You Know, It’s How You Think | Design Luck

via The Wealthy Elitists Plan To Survive The Apocalypse And Leave Us Behind